Organizing an Agency by Teams

Just like Baum und Pferdgarten, Bank of Internet USA and Rocawear, Dynamo was founded in 1999. We have morphed a lot since then, but one thing that remained static over the years was how we resourced projects, from a Human point of view that is.

From 1999 to 2015, we had always built our teams in an ad-hoc fashion depending on the nature of a project. In other words, when we would land a new project, we decide on 2 things: Who’s perfect for this job? Who’s available for this? The latter always winning out over the former. When our team was smaller (6–7 people), it wasn’t such a huge issue — there are only so many combinations to that number of resources anyway. We’d always just make it work (back then, everyone had a hand in every project anyway).

As we have grown to a staff of over 25 however, the myriad possibilities of team combinations have grown exponentially. I’m no René Descartes, but woh! that’s a lot of combinations! The thing is, projects got done, clients were happy and we were doing what everyone else was doing… so it’s all good, yes? Actually, in retrospect, it was all a bit of a Charlie Foxtrot when it came to planning, budgeting, forecasting and scaling. Then, last year, after switching to retainer contracts instead of billing by estimate, we started to really feel the pain.

So… we decided to change.

I spoke to many peers in the industry that I had met through Bureau of Digital events and gathered up as much advice as possible. Then, at the end of March 2015, we had a company retreat and announced that we’d be switching to a team structure as of April 1st! Since there would never be a perfect time to do this, we decided to “change the tires while driving” so to speak:

As well as fixing the above-mentioned issues, we also wanted to address Context Switching, Project Ownership, and Making Work Fun. What follows are the highlights of the big switch and what we’ve learned so far:

Dividing the Company into Teams:

We tried to maintain as much consistency as possible during the switch to minimize upheaval (of course). The biggest element that we considered was to keep a project’s most important person on that project. Sometimes it was the PM, sometimes it was the Developer, but it was actually quite easy to determine who that person was for each project. With consistency in mind, we then created the teams using a mix of subjective and objective observations: senior vs juniors, personality traits, remote vs in-office, etc. At the end of it, we came to 3 almost equal teams plus a small group of “rovers” (the hyper talented Dynamo Analytics, Content, Quality Assurance and Strategy stalwarts).

Presenting to the Team:

We presented all the WHYs to the team, explained the research we had done, discussed all the HOLY SHIT BUT BUT BUT issues and how we had decided to divide up the company (i.e. who was on what team). Reaction was swift and mostly positive, with a very long Q&A. At the end of it all, there was a good vibe of excitement surrounding this big change (albeit with some trepidation). Each team was to be responsible for branding & naming themselves… which helped the excitement factor I think.

What We’ve Learned So Far:

After 1 month:

• Our clients could not have cared less. I’m exaggerating here, but with the advice I received from peers, our employees and our awesome clients, the transition was as seamless as possible. It turns out they were all warm to the idea, and ultimate transition;
• The team competitiveness, thus far, has been great. We’ve got 3 teams (Team ‘Murica, Teamye and Team FEBE) and the healthy chest thumping, and shaming has been great. I’m trying to keep a keen eye/ear on this though since I always worry about quieter people;
• A few projects are still straddling and I think that’s ok… for now;
• We’re still trying to figure out how to best handle the ad-hoc “maintenance mandates” from clients that come in out of nowhere. Shortly after switching to teams, we also gave up time tracking (future post to follow), so it’s tough to bill T&M for those. We use GitHub to backtrack effort and bill accordingly, but it’s not fun to do that. And work should be fun. This particular issue is, and might always be, a work in progress.

After 2 months:

• It exposed real resource issues and provided solutions for us in short order;
• It made it easier to price our projects based on value, instead of clock hours;
• It seems like our original pass at the make-up of the teams has proven to be pretty great (seniority, skill, disciplines, etc);
• We’ve changed how we sell ourselves. We now lead our sales calls with a statement like, “You can buy 25%, 50% or 100% of a team for a minimum of 3 months” … those are the options. We try our damnedest to steer away from à la carte pricing/modelling;
• I guess we all expected this but “teams-within-teams” seems to be unavoidable. We are trying to have 3–4 projects per team and as a result, we don’t have 100% of the team working on 100% of the projects. We are still trying to address this;
• One team has all our mobile app projects plus a few other e-com projects. That team is heavy on mobile and backend, so the FEDs can be pretty light sometimes. I don’t know how to deal with this yet aside from BizDevving up some front-end only work (which we don’t usually take on). We are still trying to address this;
• The disconnection between non-teammates exists more than it did before. Again, I think we expected this, and we’re trying to address this with “department committees”, more outings full of nonsense, foosball & beer and encouraging “official mentorship” between non-teammates.

After 4 months:

On selling our teams:

• Although it’s been tough to have steadfast resolve regarding our 25%, 50% or 100% options, I’d say we’re so far so good here. We’ve been able to categorize about half of our new projects into one of these 3 optimal buckets. The other half are in their own custom percentage bucket (for better or for worse): some want 60% or 75%, etc. Obviously, we say yes;
• Some of our clients have been on retainers for a while (before we had these 3 optimal buckets) so we’ve just grandfathered them through at their existing percentage (i.e. 33%) and that’s been fine;
• Sometimes we’ll pair up a couple smaller, similar clients (say 2 clients at 10% each) and explicitly assign them to the same team (this is a w-i-p and I’m not sure it’s working… pretty tough to manage well).

On teams-within-teams:

• After having teams in place for another couple of months, I have discovered that this teams-within-teams is actually quite alright. I think this is the emotional me feeling bad for the loner kid sitting on the sidelines of the playground. However, the teams themselves are organically quite aware of this, and quite good at being inclusive for all. Pre-teams, I felt an enormous responsibility to make sure every single employee felt included, part of the team, heard, etc. And, to be honest, it kind of was my responsibility. Now though, on a team-level, it’s become the responsibility of each individual team and they’re great at it. I guess I just wasn’t ready to let it go, so to say.

On one department being light within a team:

• We’ve also done some bartering and all hell did not break loose (like we thought it would). It’s been problem-free, (mas o menos), and I actually think it’s led to some good knowledge sharing. And heck yeah! — the chemistry experiment of a lifetime!

On disconnect between non-teammates:

• Over the summer in Montréal (which is short, which makes everyone insane with desire to be outside on terraces drinking beer & mojitos), after-work get-togethers were almost daily events. This led to the “disconnect” issue being much less prevalent than before. However… I’ll be keeping my eyes/ears perked as we head into winter bliss.

Although we have been working in teams for but a blip of Dynamo’s history, I can say that the change has been glorious and has not reared any ugly heads at all. We may see more change in the future with regards to team make-up, “trading players” and other this-n-thats, but for now, our only regret was that we didn’t make the switch sooner.

I strongly encourage anyone thinking about this to go ahead and make the leap! And, in the spirit of jumping in with your eyes wide open, I also encourage you to contact me if you’d like deeper insights into any of what you’ve just read. It would be my pleasure.

Chakakhan.